When Life Hands You Lemons!

Every so often the shops have an offer on lemons that’s just too good to ignore, or you might be lucky enough to be able to grow your own lemons.  If the latter, I’m jealous; while it is warm enough for lemon trees over the summer, it is just a bit too cold during the winter and I don’t have a suitable place to overwinter the trees out of the frost. 

More often than not, I succumb to these offers, using fresh lemon juice at every opportunity but still somehow I’m left with either a couple of wizened specimens at the bottom of the fruit bowl or even worse, one that has gone mouldy and covered all the other fruit with mould spores. 

So now, I don’t take chances and freeze the juice as soon as possible.  I was spurred on by some lovely lemon-shaped silicon ice trays I found; my previous trays were the hard plastic variety and I could never get the cubes out but these are so simple to extract the shape from, it is a real pleasure to use them.

So here we go, making the most of your lemons

First of all I wash and dry the lemons, then I use a julienne cutter I have to remove the zest of the lemon.  I take off the zest in reasonably long strips as it is quite easy to break or chop smaller once it is frozen.  I just pop it into a plastic box and freeze until I need it.

I then halve the lemons, juice them and strain the juice into a small jug.  Straining removes all of the pips, (seeds), which I always find get into the juice no matter how carefully I pour out the juice from the squeezer.

Using the jug, it is then very easy to fill the ice cube trays and before long….
frozen lemon juice!

The first few times I did this, I strained and filled the trays a lemon at a time to enable me to gauge just how much juice one of the ‘cubes’ contained.  With these trays, 4 of the half lemon shapes equalled the juice from one medium, averagely juicy lemon.

But it doesn’t end there, if you want to squeeze even more from your lemons, (sorry about the pun), the squeezed halves can be used to freshen the dishwasher.  In my dishwasher I discovered that occasionally the half lemon skin could jam the lower rotor so I now cut the half in half again so it lies flat on the bottom of the dishwasher.  They last one to two washes after which they head for the compost pile.  I freeze the spare ones so they don’t go off before I use them.

A real lemon rinse!